The Collaborator of Bethlehem (2 page)

“You know who else has returned to Bethlehem from our old crowd?” George Saba’s voice sounded tight, straining to lighten the tone of the conversation. “Elias Bishara.”

“Really?” Omar Yussef smiled.

“You haven’t seen him yet? Well, he’s only been back a week. I’m sure he’ll stop by your house once he’s settled in.”

Younger than George Saba, Elias Bishara was another of Omar Yussef’s favorite pupils at his old school. “Wasn’t he studying for a doctorate in the Vatican?” Omar Yussef asked.

“Yes, but since then he’s been living in Rome as some kind of apostolic secretary to one of the cardinals. Now he’s back at the Church of the Nativity. I know, Elias and I are only asking for trouble by coming home, Abu Ramiz. Perhaps you can’t understand what it has been like for us. We grow up in this dismal place, wanting desperately to leave for another country where we can make money and live in peace. But the day always comes when you imagine the savor of real hummus and the intoxicating brightness of the sun on the hills and the sound of the church bells and the muezzins. You miss it so much you can taste the longing on your tongue. Then you come back, no matter what it is you are giving up. You just can’t help it.”

“I’ll go to the Church and say hello to Elias as soon as I get a chance.”

“Next month is Christmas, so I wanted to invite you to come with us to the Church to celebrate,” George said. “And then you and Umm Ramiz will come for Christmas dinner at my house.”

“I would be delighted, and so will she, too.”

The two men argued over who should pay the check. Both threw money onto the table and picked up the other’s cash to force it back into his hand. Then the shooting began. It was close enough that it sounded big and hollow, not like the whipcrack of faraway firing.

George looked up. “Those sons of whores, they’ve started again.” He stood, leaving his cash on the table. “Abu Ramiz, I have to go.”

They went to the door. Omar Yussef could see the tracer striping across the valley toward a house along the street. The big, bass bursts of gunfire from the village were directed toward the Israelis in the Jerusalem suburb over the wadi. The gunfire emanated from the roof of a square, two-story house only fifty yards away. There was a dark Mitsubishi jeep in the lee of the building. George Saba stepped into the street. “Jesus, I think they might be on my roof again.”

“George . . .”

“Don’t worry about me. Get out of here before the Israelis come. Not even your big clan will protect you from
them
. Goodbye, Abu Ramiz.” George Saba put an affectionate hand on Omar Yussef’s arm, then went fast along the street, bending low behind the cover of the garden walls.

Omar Yussef put his hands over his ears as the Israelis switched to a heavier gun. It shot tracers that left a deceptively slow, dotted line in the darkness, like a murderous Morse Code. That code spelled death, and the warmth that he had felt during the dinner left Omar Yussef. He could no longer see George Saba. He wondered if he should follow him. The waiter stood nervously behind him in the doorway, eager to lock up. “Are you coming inside, uncle?”

“I’m going home. Good night.”

“May God protect you.”

Omar Yussef thought he must have looked foolish, groping his way along the wall at the roadside, kicking his loafers in front of him with every step to be sure of his footing on the broken pavement. An awareness of fear and doubt came over him. He sensed movement in the alleys he passed, and shadows momentarily took on the shape of men and animals, as though he were a frightened child trying to find the bathroom in the darkness of a nighttime house. He was sweating and, where the perspiration gathered in his moustache and on the baldness of his head, the night wind chilled him.
What an old fool you are
, he told himself,
scrambling about in a battle zone in your nice shoes. Sometimes you can have a gun to your head and you still don’t know where your brains are.

The firing behind him grew more intense. He wondered what George Saba might do if he found the gunmen on his own roof again, and he decided that only when a gun points at your heart do you realize what it is that you truly love.

George Saba’s family huddled against the thick, stone wall of his bedroom. It was the side of the house farthest from the guns. George came though the front door. The shooting was louder inside and he realized the bullets were punching through the windows into his apartment. He ducked into an alcove in the corridor and crouched against the wall. At the back of the house, his living room faced the deep wadi. It was taking heavy fire from the Israeli position over the canyon.

Sofia Saba stared frantically across the corridor at her husband. She was not quite forty, but there were lines that seemed suddenly to have appeared on her face that her husband had never noticed before, as though the bullets were cracking the surface of her skin like a pane of glass. Her hair, a rich deep auburn dye, was a wild frame for her panicked eyes. She held her son and daughter, one on either side of her, their heads grasped protectively beneath her arms. All three were shaking. Next to them, Habib Saba sat silent and angry, below the antique guns mounted decoratively on the wall by his son. His cheekbones were high and his nose long and straight, like an ancient cameo of some impassive noble. Despite the gunfire, he held his head steady as an image carved from stone. George called out to his father above the hammering of the bullets on the walls, but the old man didn’t move.

Most of the Israeli rounds struck the outside wall of the living room with the deep impact of a straight hit. These were no ricochets. Every few moments, a bullet would rip through the shattered remains of the windows, cross the salon and embed itself in the wall behind which George Saba’s family sheltered. Sofia shuddered with each new impact, as though the projectiles might take down the entire wall, picking it away chunk by chunk, until it left her children exposed to the gunfire. The hideous racket of the bullets was punctuated by the sounds of mirrors and furniture falling in the living room and porcelain dropping to the stone floor from shattered shelves.

A bullet rang down the corridor and splintered the wood of the front door through which George Saba had entered. As he had dodged along the road in the darkness, he had been determined that tonight he would act. He had cursed the gunmen under his breath, and when a shot struck particularly close to him he had sworn at the top of his voice. Now he wanted only to crawl deeper into the alcove, to dig himself inside the wall until this nightmare stopped. If he stayed in the niche long enough, perhaps he would awake and find himself in his store in Santiago and this idiotic fantasy of returning to his childhood home would once more be merely a dream, not a reality of red-hot lead, blasting through his home, destructive and deadly. He looked over to the bedroom and caught his wife’s pleading expression, as she struggled to keep the heads of their children hidden beneath her arms. He wasn’t going to wake up in Chile. He couldn’t hide. He had to end this. He got to his feet, sliding up the wall, pushing his back hard against it as though it might wrap his flesh in impenetrable stone. He took the tense, expectant breath of a man dropping into freezing water and dashed across the exposed corridor into the bedroom.

George Saba hugged his wife and children to him. “It’s going to be all right, darlings,” he said. “I’m going to take care of it.” He pulled them close so they wouldn’t see that his jaw shook.

For the first time, his father moved his head. “What are you going to do?”

George looked sadly at the old man. He wasn’t fooled by the stillness with which Habib Saba held himself. It wasn’t calm and resolve that kept the old man frozen in his self-contained posture against the wall. His father cowered in the bedroom because he was accustomed to the corruption and violence of their town. He lived as quietly and invisibly as he could, because Christians were a minority in Bethlehem, and so Habib Saba was careful not to upset the Muslims by standing up to them. George had learned a different way of life during his years away from Palestine. He put his hand on his father’s shoulder and then touched the old man’s rough cheek.

Quickly, George stood and reached for an antique revolver mounted on the wall. It was a British Webley VI from the Second World War that he had bought a few months before from the family of an old man who had once served in the Jordanian Arab Legion and kept the gun as a souvenir of his English officers. The gray metal was dull and there was rust on the hinge, so that the cylinder couldn’t be opened. But in the darkness its six-inch barrel would look deadly enough, unlike the three inlaid Turkish flintlocks that decorated the bedroom wall beside it. George Saba tightened his hand around the square-cut grip and felt the gun’s weight.

Habib reached out for his son’s arm, but couldn’t hold fast. Sofia screamed when she saw the revolver in her husband’s hand. At the sound, her daughter peered from under her mother’s arm. George knew he must act now or the sight of those frightened eyes would break him. He reached down and put his hand over the child’s brow, as though to close her eyes. “Don’t worry, little Miral. Daddy’s going to tell the men to stop playing and making noise.” It sounded stupid and, for the moment, he kept his fingers over the girl’s face so that he wouldn’t see the look of incredulity he felt sure would have registered on her features. Even a child could tell this was no game. Then he dashed through the front door.

Chapter 2

D
arkness smothered the valley swiftly, sliding gray down the steep hillsides, blotting out the scanty olive trees and shading the romantic portraits of the martyrs in the cemetery, until it settled over the village of Irtas. In the home of the Abdel Rahmans, no one turned on the lights. To do so would have illuminated the vegetable patch and the glade of pines outside, through which the family expected their eldest son to creep home soon for the
iftar
, the evening meal to break the Ramadan fast. In the front room of the house, Dima Abdel Rahman set down a tray of
kamar al-din
. She placed the glasses of apricot juice before the cushions where each member of the family would sit to eat. The glass with the most fruit floating in it, she put by the corner of the low table, where Louai would want to sit so that he could watch the windows for any threat. Then she went to the open window for a moment and, ignoring the excited, fluttery calls of her mother-in-law from the kitchen, strained her eyes into the shadows for a sight of her husband. She adjusted her cream headscarf, which curved to a pin below her chin and emphasized the strong oval of her face. Her eyes were a light, warm brown, like the foliage of Palestine’s brief autumn, and her lashes were long. It was a kindly, confident face, though it was tainted by an undertone of recent loneliness and an anxious tightness about her lips. She shivered and hugged herself as the night’s chill penetrated her bright holiday robe.

The building was well situated for these clandestine visits. Louai Abdel Rahman could move from his hideout in Irtas to this square two-story house a quarter of a mile along the valley without stepping into the open, where Israeli hit squads might see him. The cinderblock homes and winding streets of Irtas billowed across the lowest slopes and into the narrow bottom, looking from this end of the valley like rushing rapids washing through a crevasse, foaming against the precipices and cresting on fingers of easier gradients. At the edge of the village, the valley was a fertile place, the green plots of the
fellahins
spraying out around the famous gardens of the Roman Catholic convent tended by the Sisters of the Hortus Conclusus. Behind the Abdel Rahman house at the head of the valley were the ancient wells known as Solomon’s Pools, which fed the main aqueduct of Herod’s Jerusalem. With springs across the vale, the people of Irtas allowed themselves a luxury barred to other rural Palestinians, who strained to eke out the fetid contents of their cisterns through the eight dry months of summer: in Irtas there were tall, shady pine trees, as well as the squat, functional olives to which most villages were limited. Dima Abdel Rahman knew her husband could move about, hidden beneath the canopy of leaves, as though nature wished to be complicit in his struggle against the occupation. If the Israelis watched from above, Louai would surely see them, because the thick vegetation thinned and petered out as the hillsides cut up from the narrow floor of the wadi. The soldiers would be exposed on those bare slopes, even in the twilight.

Then Dima Abdel Rahman heard sounds among the trees.
It must be him
, she thought. She kept quiet, even though her mother-in-law called her to help with the serving once more. There was nothing moving that she could see, but the undergrowth crackled beneath careful footsteps. He was coming, for the first time in weeks. She straightened her headscarf excitedly once more and fiddled with the pin beneath her throat.

No matter how long Louai hid from the Israelis, she would never grow accustomed to the absences between his visits to the house where she lived with his parents, his brother and three sisters. They had been married only a year, but he had been underground most of that time. It was as her parents had feared. Before the wedding, they had consulted with their neighbor,
ustaz
Omar Yussef, a respected friend of her father and a schoolteacher who took a special interest in her. He had told Dima’s father that, though there was a risk the girl soon would be widowed, there seemed to be love between the two young people and such feelings ought to be nurtured in these days of hate.

So Dima had given up her studies at the UNRWA Girls School in Dehaisha to marry Louai. She went to work in her father-in-law’s autoshop, doing the accounts and answering the phones. At home she ended up doing the family’s housework and dreaming of Louai’s rare homecomings. It became a week or longer between his visits to the house, and each time he spent only an hour or two with her before he had to be gone once more. When he wasn’t there, she was melancholy. Without her husband to enliven her nights, the days in the glass booth at the back of the garage were dull. Worse, Louai’s father Muhammad and his brother Yunis grew cold toward her, as though they blamed her for the risks he took in coming through the darkness to the house. Or maybe it was something else.